So Krugman is at is again. This time the New York Times resident idiot is towing the new Democratic party line…I know it’s a shock to see Paul Krugman just have a knee jerk reaction to repeat Democratic talking points. Which talking point is it today…why what else we need to tax the rich. He even has a cute name for the article “Things to Tax”….hmm

You have the usual level of Krugman insanity, such as:

Nonetheless, at some point we’ll have to rein in budget deficits. And when we do, here’s a thought: How about making increased revenue an important part of the deal?

That line is of course coming from the man who has been against all cuts to spending, who had incessantly beat the drum for MORE spending. But now he wants to reign in the deficit he helped created. But of course it has to be done by raising taxes. Which taxes? Well he suggests “taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions.” Don’t you like how he broke out a 5th grade thesaurus and said “high income” and not “rich.” You’d have to be an idiot or a Democrat to think he wasn’t saying something cliché, but I repeat myself.

Try this quote:

“The I.R.S. reports that in 2007, that is, before the economic crisis, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — roughly speaking, people with annual incomes over $2 million — had a combined income of more than a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money, and it wouldn’t be hard to devise taxes that would raise a significant amount of revenue from those super-high-income individuals.

Well no, highway robbery isn’t “hard” to do when you have all the power…why worry about things like ethics. Did you notice how he mentions they have a trillion dollars? A whole trillion. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Which means that if we taxed every last cent out of the these evil greedy bastards who have no right to earn money from their labor and took their trillion dollars…well it still won’t pay for the $3.7 Trillion dollar yearly budget. (Won’t even cover the $1.101 Trillion shortfall…and let’s not forget that shortfall is calculated after the rich have been contributing a lot of money to the tax codes already).

But still it would raise lots of money.

For example, a recent report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out that before 1980 very-high-income individuals fell into tax brackets well above the 35 percent top rate that applies today. According to the center’s analysis, restoring those high-income brackets would have raised $78 billion in 2007.

Ooooh, $78 Billion dollars! Wow, that sounds like a lot doesn’t it. That means if we had go back to 2001 and instead of cutting taxes raising them to Krugman’s level we would have raised $780 Billion dollars…ah hell I’ll say $800 Billion to account for variance from year to year. $800 Billion! So let’s see, Obama has raised the national debt by $5 Trillion which means that if we had raised that $800 Billion then Obama would only have a measly $4.2 Trillion increase to his name. Hmmmm…I’m not seeing raising taxes as being the salvation here. Maybe we might want to try cutting something from the budget? NO! What was I thinking I’m dealing with a Krugman article. The fact that math shows that raising taxes won’t help the problem has nothing, not one single thing to do with the moral imperative we have to tax the rich to death (and then spend the country into death). And clearly there would be not a single adverse effect to the economy because raising taxes has never hurt an economy (if you ignore every time in history taxes have been raised, but that’s minor caveat).

After all Krugman states

“what I get for the next decade is that high-income taxation could shave more than $1 trillion off the deficit.”

Yeah cause we’re only raising the debt by almost a trillion and a half every year. So after a decade instead of having raised the debt by $15 Trillion, we’ll have only raised the debt by $14 Trillion. Clearly raising taxes on the rich will solve everything.

But then it gets really fun. Because Krugman deals with the people who claim we need to cut the budget. Read for yourself:

“It’s instructive to compare that estimate with the savings from the kinds of proposals that are actually circulating in Washington these days. Consider, for example, proposals to raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67, dealing a major blow to millions of Americans. How much money would that save?

“Well, none from the point of view of the nation as a whole, since we would be pushing seniors out of Medicare and into private insurance, which has substantially higher costs. True, it would reduce federal spending — but not by much. The budget office estimates that outlays would fall by only $125 billion over the next decade, as the age increase phased in. And even when fully phased in, this partial dismantling of Medicare would reduce the deficit only about a third as much as could be achieved with higher taxes on the very rich.”

Of all the cuts to spending that conservatives, libertarians, the Republican Party, the Tea Party, the GOP candidates have suggested…does anyone remember raising the age of Medicare as being a top one? No I don’t either. I have absolutely no problem with it. But it’s an odd one to pick.

How about this, here is a link to a proposed budget by Tea Party organization Freedomworks . Their budget cuts a $560 Billion in the first year and 9.7 Trillion over the next 10 years. Now I personally don’t think it goes far enough, but I’m willing to take 9.7 Trillion in cuts over the next decade over (which will probably be more because such behavior would spur the economy and bring in larger tax receipts) Krugman’s $0.8 Trillion in new revenue (which will probably be less as it would further depress the economy and lower tax receipts).

So I don’t know if Krugman is just stupid and doesn’t get that we need to stop spending and that spending cuts are bigger than his pathetic revenue increase.

But here is my favorite line.

So raising taxes on the very rich could make a serious contribution to deficit reduction. Don’t believe anyone who claims otherwise.

Serious in this case meaning not slowing down the growth of the debt by even a little. And yes don’t believe anyone claims otherwise, they’re using that “evil math thing” and as all good liberals know you can’t trust math, or facts, or truth…because we have faith knowing that taxing the rich will solve all our problems and that Obama is the one true god and that Krugman is his prophet. Evil math can’t ever be trusted.

He also very competently deals with detractors with the following statement:

“But wouldn’t such a tax hurt economic growth? As I said, the evidence suggests not” I have no clue what mystical evidence” he is referring to because it’s certainly not to be found ANYWHERE in the history of the world. But again don’t let facts get in the way of taxing the rich.

And then there is just the bizarre….

“And then there’s the idea of taxing financial transactions,” he suggests that putting a tax on the sale of stock could reduce bubbles and economic instability. Technically he’s right. Several people have advocated for such a thing, myself included …but as far as I know the only people who have ever seriously advocated for this do it as a part of a complete tax overhaul, usually demanding that the capital gains tax be radically lowered if not completely eliminated as putting two sets of taxes on investments would be somewhere past insane (but that kind of makes it right up Krugman’s alley). And to prove why we need this Krugman states, “and that among those who do are Hong Kong and Singapore. If some conservative starts claiming that such taxes are an unwarranted government intrusion, you might want to ask him why such taxes are imposed by the two countries that score highest on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.” Yeah let’s just ignore that while these countries have such a financial transfer tax (4.45% in Hong Kong ) that they have massively reduced tax burdens, no capital gains, no death tax, no payroll tax, no sales tax. Paul you can’t claim that Hong Kong has a good tax system in the second half of your article when everything else about the tax system in Hong Kong is absolute proof that the first half of your article was written by someone who is functionally retarded.

But to realize this little contradiction is probably beyond Krugman’s meager intellectual abilities. Remember he doesn’t even believe in math.

sarahpainterbooks:Some days I need to be gentle with myself, to remind myself that I am a fallible and fragile human and that it’s okay if I only write one paragraph (or go out for a ‘creativity-enhancing’ walk instead of writing).Other days, I just need to read this.

asexualconservative:Russia is on the advance of its conquestISIS is on the counter attack to spread radical islamIran is going to get the bomb and threaten the worldChina is buying the world to spread its control and communismAnd you want me to believe that Isreal is the greater evil?Like I’m generally afraid of fucking world war three here and you want to c […]